WASHINGTON — Georgetown University researchers announced the discovery of a blood test that can predict whether a person will develop Alzheimer’s disease or a related condition within three years.

Their study, described Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine, identifies 10 lipids in the blood that predict onset of the disease.

Researchers tested the blood of 525 people age 70 and older over five years, 74 of whom either began the study meeting the criteria or later developed the criteria for mild Alzheimer’s disease or a memory loss condition known as amnestic mild cognitive impairment that is often a precursor to Alzheimer’s. Among those who developed the disease, researchers discovered the presence of 10 lipids that were abnormal and that predicted with more than 90 percent accuracy the onset of the disease.

They plan to expand the study by looking at larger longitudinal studies to see whether these lipids were present in the blood of patients in those studies who later developed the disease, said Howard Federoff, professor of neurology and executive vice president for health sciences at Georgetown University Medical Center, who led the study. If so, he said, they would move on to clinical trials.

“We want to look back on when they were asymptomatic and see if these lipids were present,” he said, noting that a larger study would offer greater range in terms of patients’ age and racial diversity.

There is no cure or effective treatment for Alzheimer’s, which afflicts more than 5 million Americans and 35.6 million people worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists Alzheimer’s as the sixth-leading cause of death, but recent research ranks it as the third-biggest killer in the U.S. The numbers of those affected are expected to nearly triple by 2050 if there are no significant medical breakthroughs.

A large field of research is looking at indicators for Alz-heimer’s in blood and cerebral spinal fluid. It would probably be several years before a test for the lipids identified in this study could be ordered by a physician.

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